


you're a silver screen, visual balladry

by meritmut



Series: force bond interludes [4]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Formalwear, Heart-to-Heart, Late Night Conversations, Light Angst, Post-Canon, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Unresolved Romantic Tension, flustered ben
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 06:44:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17720126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: You’re beautiful,he wants to tell her.I have never known anything like you.





	you're a silver screen, visual balladry

**

He is in his quarters, lost in thinking and the endless sprawl of space outside the viewport, when the distant rumble of the ship’s engines fades into nothing and between one breath and another Ben is—somewhere else.

The room around him shifts, flickers. The silence ebbs, the hum of faraway voices creeping in around the edges of his awareness. Double vision: his mind in two places at once. A breeze lifts his hair from the back of his neck and when he looks up, the stars on the other side of the glass belong to another system’s sky.

There isn’t time to name the constellations scattered across the firmament. He feels her nearby like a storm gathering in the air; the strange, hushed closeness, the wordless sense of _something_ coming. Her mind is near enough that he could reach out and—

The hand on his knee curls into a fist.

It has been weeks since he last saw her. Weeks, since the last time he looked into her face or spoke her name or felt the weight of her inevitable disappointment, and Ben doesn’t _want_ to turn around now but his body is already moving, twisting in his chair, drawn by this terrible needy thing inside him to where he knows instinctively he will find her.

When he does, every thought in his head skitters to a standstill.

Heat floods his cheeks, and he knows he’s staring but he can’t help it because Rey is—

_Rey is wearing a gown._

He has imagined her in gowns before. Who wouldn’t, if the Force teased a future where she would one day be a queen, and sit enthroned above all others? Who, in his innermost thoughts, in daydreams born in the rapt communion of their souls, could resist that vision’s lure?

Not Ben, standing in the ruined hall with the world coming down around them, his mind a mess of bloodlust and relief and fierce, dizzied joy, a wildfire of adrenaline coursing through him and his heart racing fit to burst because she was _there_ —Rey was with him, her saber blazing at his side, and they were both alive and for one single moment the future unfurled clear and wide and glittering ahead of them and in that instant, when everything around them was burning but it hadn’t yet turned to ash, Ben had allowed himself to imagine what such a future might look like. He had let himself envision what _she_ might look like in the raiment of a queen, draped in silk and samite and radiant as the stars.

_Queen. Empress. Goddess._

She was a dream, that creature. She wasn’t something that could ever be, even if the image of her enchanted every part of him.

Oh, but this—this is _real_.

Rey is standing by the viewport, her arms folded across her chest and her eyes somewhere far away, just as his had been a moment ago. Ben’s heart thuds in his chest as he takes in the expanse of skin left bare by the garment’s cut; the divots of her collarbones and the muscular ridge of her shoulders, her jawline defined by the halter wrapped loosely around her throat. She is otherworldly, like this, silhouetted by the stars and swathed in silk so fine it could pass through the eye of a needle—so fine that the colour he had originally taken for black reveals itself, on closer inspection, to be dark porphyritic purple, sheer as smoke and flushed with the warmth of her skin.

(So fine that his jaw drops a little when he sees the way her gossamer bodice clings, gathering at her waist to fall in layers of diaphanous blue to her feet.)

Ben’s gaze lingers for only a second until his brain catches up with his eyes and, ears burning, he ducks his head before she can catch him staring. He fixes his sights on the ground beneath her feet: it seems the safest place to look when she is so close that he can make out the freckles on her shoulders, the old scar on her cheek, the loose wisps of hair at the base of her neck which quiver in the air of another world.

Anywhere else is peril. Anywhere else might be the end of him.

His chest is full of flutters and his mouth is dry and he doesn’t often think of things like _lovely_ but she is just so _much_ of it that he can scarcely breathe. Licking his lips, Ben lifts his head once more and hopes she cannot see it.

If Rey is aware of his attention, or the mystified wonder lapping over the bond, she gives no sign.

But then he opens his mouth, and she mutters something that sounds terribly like _don’t_.

So much for her unawareness. Ben chews on the inside of his cheek—harder to let anything slip, that way. Harder to let his mouth run away where his brain can’t catch it, and say something to leave her furious or disdainful or (maybe the worst of all) _sad._ Instead he simply looks at her, because it has been weeks since the last time he could and maybe Rey has no interest in hearing him speak but she hasn’t tried to shoot him yet either, so it’s already going better than the first time this happened. Gnawing on his own lip, he searches for the words.

 _You’re beautiful,_ he wants to tell her. _I have never known anything like you._

“You—uh—”

_You undo me. You reach inside and you steal the heart out of me._

“Taken to scavenging vesture, now?”

_Smooth, Solo._

It doesn’t come out as scathing as it could have, mercifully, so Ben risks a glance at Rey. She is looking down at herself, smoothing the palm of one hand over her silk-covered thigh as though she has only just noticed the finery.

“It’s a loan,” she says flatly, and maybe she was in ill spirits already but maybe it is just the effect he has on people. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

He bites back a smile. There’s something so terribly _young_ in the mulish look on her face, the way she wraps her arms around her midriff as if to hold herself together with sheer stubbornness. It sits incongruously with the dark glamour of her makeup, the elegance of her chestnut hair pinned up like a tousled crown. It charms him, hopelessly.

“Where are you?” Ben leans back against his desk and folds his arms, unconsciously mirroring her. “Do the rebels have you courting donors, now?”

“No.” Rey glances sidelong at him, one imperious eyebrow arched. “Maybe I wanted to go to a party.”

Ben blinks. His early years are a haze of soirees, political dinners and senatorial galas which he would either attend—for the first hour, his teenage self sneaking wine when his mother wasn’t looking—or spend at home on his own, waiting for her to return. In the decade-and-a-half or so since he abandoned that life for an ascetic’s path, he had almost forgotten things like parties exist.

The idea that Rey had spontaneously decided to forget the war, the Force, her destiny, and simply _go out_ leaves him a little bit lost for words.

Her surroundings shift in and out of focus around them, a broken holo against the backdrop of his quarters. For a moment Ben floats in a sea of blue, deep and endless and glimmering, blinking through the faint light-headedness of standing on the edge of the sky. She’s outside somewhere, alone, but somewhere not far away the sound of music and voices continues and Ben knows it is because she wants to be.

He tips his head to one side, curious. “What’s the last Jedi doing hiding on her own, then?”

The sound that escapes her is low and sad, a rueful little sigh that mists in the air around her. In the eternal mild climate of his quarters the effect is ethereal: there is a transparency to her, like if he were to reach out his hands would pass right through her.

“Maybe the last Jedi hates parties.”

He knows better, though, doesn’t he? If he were to reach for her now, if she would ever reach back—

A quiet envelopes them that is deeper than any Ben has ever known. Words have never come easily to him (perhaps things would be different, if they did) but silence has never felt so effortless. He isn’t compelled to break it, to fill it with empty noise in the hope of drowning out the whispers: the voices are quieter, these days, and it is enough now to stand a few feet away from her and just...be.

“I’m not, you know.”

It’s said so softly Ben almost misses it. He turns further towards her, taking in her sombre expression. “Not what?”

“A Jedi.” Rey rubs at her arms, working some heat back into them: it must be freezing wherever she is and her gown is finer than gauze, falling about her like a butterfly’s folded wings. She trembles in the night air.

Ben resists the wild impulse to offer her his body heat. “That’s not what I hear.”

Her jaw clenches. She is gripping her own biceps now, her fingers white at the knuckle. “You’re hearing it now,” she replies frostily. “It’s true. I’m—I’m no good at it.”

A dozen unkind comments rise to the tip of his tongue, but Ben takes in her hunched shoulders and the way she can’t seem to meet his eyes anymore and for once, they go no further.

“Few are,” he says instead, and watches her head jerk up to stare at him. “I am not the man to tell you to regret it.”

She studies him in silence for a time, her greenish gaze filled with conflict. He wants to have the answer to what troubles her. He wants to _be_ the answer.

“No,” she concedes, her expression losing a little of its rigidity. “But—I have to be.”

“Why?” Ben pushes himself away from the desk and moves close to her. She doesn’t back away, exactly—she can’t with a wall behind her—but she lowers her arms to her sides and stands straighter, more defiant than defensive. “Rey, why?”

There’s a glass in her hand. He hadn’t noticed that till now, but it makes the moment even more surreal. He wonders if she’s thinking of burying it in his neck.

Instead, she just looks a little despondent. “There’s no one else.”

“So it falls to you to tear your heart out?” Scorn creeps into his voice, but she looks so _defeated_ by this destiny she is allowing others to decide for her and Ben hates it. It enrages him, that these people she _chose_ and bears such inexplicable loyalty to would turn her into something she is not, and it infuriates him even more that she is letting it happen. “Pretend you feel nothing? Surrender yourself to an idea of the Force that would deny you half of what it means to be alive?”

“What choice do I have?” Rey bites, her eyes flashing fire. “The dark side? Lose myself because I can’t control this thing inside me?”

The unspoken: _become like you?_

“You have a choice,” Ben snaps back, takes a breath and forces the edge from his voice. “There’s another way.”

A bitter smile crosses Rey’s mouth. She looks away, and he watches the tension slough off her shoulders like a living weight. “The balance.”

Ben’s heart _leaps._ He sinks his teeth into his lip again to keep from lurching forward, reaching for her hand and crying _yes—yes, you feel it too!_

“The Jedi had their time.” Miraculously, he manages to keep his tone level. “The galaxy has no need of them, anymore.”

Her expression grows a little wry. “You sound like Luke.” He must make a face at that, because something flickers in her eyes that is almost remorse.

“He said...exactly the same thing, actually.”

At least it isn’t just him she refuses to listen to, then. Though—Ben isn’t sure he enjoys being grouped in with Skywalker even in this.

Rey has moved over to the viewport again, her back to him. The stars surround her; the universe tangles in her hair.

“I don’t know how to be everything they need me to be,” she admits quietly.

How can it be, that she guts him with a single utterance. Ben commits the moles on her shoulder to memory while contemplating how he might avenge them.

“Neither did I,” he murmurs. Rey bows her head, and for a second the _grief_ rolling over the bond takes his breath away. She is _so_ sad, her sorrow so profound and it’s for more than just him, or her, it is for everything that has been done to them: everything that has been denied or taken from them, and maybe the deprivation in his youth will never measure up to hers but Rey does not see things in such terms: pain is pain, and there is no unfeeling it.

Her compassion is indiscriminate and limitless and it _terrifies_ him but he wants— _needs_ —to go to her, to try somehow to make it better, yet Rey is already turning and her eyes are bright with unshed tears and Ben fists his hands at his sides to keep from reaching out as she approaches him again.

“You told me,” she begins, swallows thickly. “You told me that I wasn’t alone.”

Ben nods.

“Can you—” She steps closer. Her hands are clenched at her sides too: she is afraid, he realises.

“What?” He presses gently, so gently. Maybe this is where she finds her courage.

Her dark eyes beseech him: Ben is lost.

“Can you say it again?”

**

**Author's Note:**

> this was supposed to go in a bigger vignette collection however comma impulse control
> 
> kisses to [aionimica](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aionimica) for her frock input ([said frock](http://ffw.uol.com.br/app/uploads/desfiles/2017/03/esa-fw17-123-654x980.jpg))


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